Debbie Kline's killer Ronald Henninger dies in prison

Ronald Henninger, one of two men convicted of murdering Debbie Sue Kline, 18, of Waynesboro in 1976, died in prison on Sunday.

Kline was abducted a little more than a month after graduating from Waynesboro Area Senior High School.

She was on her way home from her job in the cafeteria at Waynesboro Hospital on July 22 when her car was run off Country Club Road by Henninger and Richard Dodson. The pair forced her into their car and drove her to a remote dump in the Fannettsburg area, where they raped her and then slit her throat.

Dodson led police to her body in January 1977.

Shawn Hardy

One of two men serving life in prison for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a Waynesboro teenager nearly 36 years ago died in prison over the weekend.

Ronald Henninger died in the State Correctional Institution at Laurel Highlands on Sunday, according to a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

Henninger, 73, was initially sentenced to death for killing Debbie Sue Kline, 18, in July 1976. His sentence was commuted to life in prison when the death penalty was ruled unconstitutional.

His co-defendant, Richard Dodson, 65, also is serving a life sentence and is jailed at the State Correctional Institution in Huntingdon.

‘Missing Person’

“The wheels of justice are finally coming around to putting an end to a heart-breaking situation,” said Kenneth L. Peiffer Jr. of Chambersburg. A Record Herald photojournalist who covered Kline’s disappearance, Peiffer and the late Robert V. Cox, Record Herald assistant managing editor, wrote “Missing Person” about the case.

They described the “blanket of fear” that spread over the Waynesboro area after Kline disappeared; the heartbreak of the Kline family, including parents Dick and Jane; the tireless effort of police to solve the case; and the eerily accurate information provided by psychic Dorothy Allison, who was contacted by the Kline family and visited the area just before the teen’s body was found under a plastic swimming pool at a mountainside dump near Fannettsburg in January 1977.

Kline was taken a little more than a month after graduating from Waynesboro Area Senior High School.

She was on her way home from her job in the cafeteria at Waynesboro Hospital on July 22 when her car was run off Country Club Road by Henninger and Dodson. The pair forced her into their car and drove her to a remote dump in the Fannettsburg area, where they raped her and then slit her throat.

In the days following Kline’s disappearance, scores of volunteers turned out to help search for clues around the area where her car was found and fear spread throughout the community.
“The townspeople began to stay in after dark, submitting to a self-imposed curfew,” Cox and Peiffer wrote in “Missing Person.” “Strangers in town were greeted brusquely, if at all. Parents watched the clock when their children were due home. In Waynesboro, the shadows had become ominous.”

The killers

Henninger and Dodson had already been identified as suspects when Dodson confessed and directed police to Kline’s body after he was arrested for an attempted rape in the Fort McCord area.

Lorrie Lee Hoffman, who is Henninger’s biological daughter and was married to Dodson at the time, called The Record Herald Monday about his death.

“Somehow I wanted everyone in the area to know ... the family, the cops, the townspeople,” said Hoffman, who was 18 when she married Dodson. Their marriage broke up between the time of Kline’s murder and when the body was found and she fled the area in fear of her father.

Hoffman, who was placed in foster care when she was 5 and later adopted, reunited with Henninger in her teens. That’s when she met Dodson, who was her father’s cellmate at a prison in Illinois.

Henninger’s criminal record started with being AWOL from the Navy numerous times, advanced through charges like forgery and theft and then to manslaughter. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of a man named Francis “Frank” Fenton in Illinois — although he later told people he had been hired to killed Fenton, according to “Missing Person.”

He was paroled on April 1, 1976 — just months before Kline was kidnapped and killed — and moved to Greencastle, where he lived with Richard and Lorrie Lee Dodson and Richard Dodson’s parents.

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